Ghast Up

The unusually named Ghast Up was a very short-lived Manchester fanzine lasting just three issues with the last one published in July of 1977 and was the brainchild of Mick Middles and Martin Ryan. Mick, like other fanzine writers, would make the jump to the mainstream and be the Manchester correspondent on Sounds weekly music paper during the late seventies & eighties.

As such it ran interviews with local bands Buzzcocks, The Drones and Slaughter & The Dogs and visiting bands like The Vibrators, Wayne County, The Saints and The Jam.

The fanzine was stocked in Rough Trade and managed to run an advert for Generation X’s debut single Your Generation in its last issue and received the princely sum of £15.

Here’s some blurb from Martin Ryan on Ghast Up from the excellent Manchester Digital Media Archive website. There are also pages from the fanzines and assorted bits and bobs.

Ghast Up fanzine ran from April 1977 until July 1977. The original idea for starting a fanzine was Mick Middles’ who I think had seen Sniffin’ Glue, 48 Thrills etc in the old Virgin shop on Lever Street, Manchester and deduced that it was possible without incurring massive printing and publishing costs, although at that point we were not sure how we would print it and what the costs would be.

The tipping point was a letter to the New Hormones address on the back of Spiral Scratch EP that elicited a phone call from Pete Shelley inviting us to interview the band in Manchester. From that point it was a case of how rather than if.

Only 3 issues were published, all being produced on a Roneo Stencil machine. Issues 2 and 3 were printed on a machine purchased in Ashton-Under-Lyne that came full of green ink. Despite adding black ink, we never got rid of the green, which became our trademark colour. The exhibition includes scanned pages of the 3 issues together with other artefacts associated with the magazine and its production.

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